In February 2002, the UI received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a COBRE. The funding brings together with expertise in computational biology, computer science and biology to investigate the relative importance of various mutagenic processes on the tempo and trajectory of adaptive evolution, the functional significance of patterns that emerge during the course of evolution, and to develop computational approaches that improve ability to understand the evolutionary history of functional domains in proteins, structural genes, and entire genomes. The funding from the NIH COBRE program has been used to establish the Center for Research on Processes in Evolution (CRePE) at the UI. Requested supplemental funding are to enhance completion and extension of the experimental evolution experiments proposed as an integral part of CRePE. Specifically the funds will be used to: 1) renovate teaching laboratory space to research laboratory space that will be used for expansion of the Core Molecular Biology facility, 2) expand the capabilities of the Core Molecular Biology facility for DNA library construction and screening, DNA sequencing, as well as Southern and Northern hybridization analyses, and 3) acquire equipment useful in studies on the experimental evolution of prokaryotic populations.